Will UC Solutions supersede VOIP/IPT entirely?

I think UC has a long way to go before displacing IPT - if ever. Old habits die hard, and the telephone still works pretty well, and phone calls are still the best way to communicate short of being face-to-face. Voice is but one element of UC, and as good as UC can be - the current state of adoption is pretty light, and it's usually done in conjunction with IPT. It's still pretty early for companies to drop their IP PBX altogether and go totally UC.

Actually, it's not that radical to think that the PBX will disappear - I happen to think that way, and the time will come when voice is totally integrated into the desktop as well as various forms of "media devices" that make calls along with many other things. But not yet!

Voice will always be an integral part of the way humans communicate in my opinion. But the way we in the IT profession handle that voice is what's going to make communications take a quantum leap. IP telephony is one piece of that, UC is another. Once true 'convergence' between the two is attained you're going to see people communicating in ways we simply haven't dreamed of yet.

IPT will be the platform, UC will be the architecture and it's going to change the way we live, play, AND do business. Now that IP Telephony providers are taking the first steps to virtualize their offerings moving voice to the Cloud is the obvious next step.

While the IP PBX will be here for a long time to come Voice In The Cloud will make steady inroads into that with UC following very closely behind it.

So in short I would have to answer your question with a 'yes, maybe, someday'.

I'm confused about the question. The question states "Will UC solutions supersede VoIP/IPT entirely?"

The question assumes that VoIP and "UC" are separate things. If a technology is built on top of an existing technology, does the new platform supersede the old? Or is the old simply evolved into something greater and new?

UC cannot supersede VoIP because in my definition of "supersede" something is displaced.

There will always be conversation between people carried over a distance by some technology. VoIP only means "Voice over Internet Protocol" - it doesn't mean "SIP" or "SCCP" or "GSM" or any of the other protocols that have been developed to packetize voice and transmit it over the Internet. This won't change.

As long as humans speak, we will need a way to transmit those conversations, and we will refer to the general category of these transmissions as VoIP because "VoIP" is to "Legacy Voice" what "Digital" is to "Analog".

UC just adds the integration of other communication mediums like text and video - but the audio is most often still carried using SIP or something similar, which makes it VoIP.

Take a deep look at Apple's open FaceTime protocol - it uses SIP for the audio portion, and many other protocols all in one in order to quickly setup a unified communications experience automatically. This is the type of UC application we can expect from now on.

My 2 cents.

The answer is simple - Yes. Everything has a time and place. We've seen analog devices replaced by digital that promised to deliver more features. This evolved into IP devices offering to take advantage of the network while delivering even more feature and functionality. SIP devices are now becoming more prevalent as it offers simplicity, openness, and communication regardless of device. The younger generation would much rather text, IM, or use Social Networking sites to communicate. Many businesses recognize this and they need to be thinking about how to recruit these customers and potential employees. The main players in the market are already deploying these technologies and the forwarding thinking clients are using them. So, yes it is inevitable that one day, maybe a year or maybe 10 years, IPT will be displaced by UC application(s). And just like we saw analog displaced by Digital we'll see UC displaced by the next greatest technology.

UC - also known as telepresence - is still a niche market. Meaningful presence requires expensive equipment, and large amounts of bandwidth.
An additional problem never mentioned with telepresence: it is often touted as THE thing for busy CxOs for negotiations, enabling multiple meetings across continents. That is nice.
What is even nicer is that smart negotiators will use telepresence feeds cloned to their own body language experts, and possibly even trained AI programs, for competitive advantage. They will get a near real time feed as to the body language feedback of the people they are talking to, and depending on the fidelity of the audio, voice stress analysis.
The need for translators will often provide the necessary delay for the analysis to occur, and be fed to the negotiating team.
This is a great advantage for commercial and political negotiations.
I have not noted any vendor offering filtering capabilities to counter these kinds of analytic tactics, much less voice an awareness of such capabilities.

Many thanks to everyone that posted a comment or response!

I am quite impressed at the responses offered and the differing explanations.

It seems that the general consensus is that VOIP (in whatever form or definition one may have) will be slowly "ingested" (hope Mr. Tyler above is happier with this word rather than "supersede") by some form of UC Solution.

Whether than in turn competes in the IP-PBX space is uncertain for the time being however as more and more of our comms shift to cloud-based offerings then perhaps UC will become the default deployment rather than IP-PBX's.. perhaps another topic for another day...

Thanks to all who participated and offered their "2 cents worth"!

Val Jelinic
Key Business Development Manager
MNG Europe SA
Switzerland

If we think outside the enterprise market scope, VOIP+Video usage is still in its infancy. We haven't yet seen the days with IPTV+IPPhone+Video conference all in one box in our homes, followed by affordable video calls on 3G/4G mobile phones... Is IP-video-telephony a subset of UC or is UC an extension to it? IMHO IP video telephony will be the main communication media in the future. Other text based components of UC will be there in case you want to contact offline or just say "hello" in the office. Cheaper bandwidth and succesful implementations of these complicated technologies will just tell us when it will happen. Do not forget IPV6 as well.

My first gut reaction was posted by Tyler. Yes, VoIP by definition describes the means of transmission, the protocol used to transmit voice, or even video. I have worked on UC technology build in the mid 80's. All based on TDM infrastructure. For me UC is nothing more than an interface. A method of combining inboxes and contact list - a single point of contact for - fax, IM, chat, email, voice and offering as many communication options via a single point of contact or device. In other words, read a fax on your mobile phone and reply to customer via a quick email without having to change devices or open a new application. Whatever protocol or methods of transmission is used to carry the data does not matter (VoIP/TDM/T.38). Moving communication methods into "the cloud" greatly facilitates the ability for the development of a UC interface with hooks into mutiple cloud fragments to offer the most extensible method of displaying the UC interface via a device. Nothing will be displaced - rather a higher level application interface is required.

Dear folks.

Unified communications(UC) has won! At the enterprise level, Organizations are looking for better ways to "Squeeze the juice" of how their collection of cellphones, Hard and Soft Phones, email systems, faxes, Paging, Video conferencing, live collaboration and Mission critical Applications to name a few are integrated and managed. It is all connected and Alive!!

On the Carrier ( Cloud ) retail side, it is almost water under the bridge. Cell phones specially can do it all. The line of UC devices like Androids, Cius and IPads than can run all apps and keep you operational and wired to wherever your reality is.

We all better ride the wave, and do our own juice squeezing.

Cheers

http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/iatd/stats.html . Study this. As a VoIP entrepreneur I got surprised by the very low percentage of real VoIP users when talking about pure speech. This in combination with the daily difficulties I have to convince new potential customer to use VoIP or even UC as their main communication tool makes me wonder if we really can replace the traditional "secure" telco's with something that is called UC. The main issue is that we forget the awareness session with potential customers and just jump into the deep offering something that they do not understand. It takes a while to kill old habits I read in somebodies comment and that is exactly it. We should more focus on teaching the potential customers out there about the "what is UC" rather than trying to stuff the technology up their throats. So in short without some awareness session UC will never be anything than a beautiful not used tool in the future. Remember that UC exist in whatever form for a long time and still got not accepted. We should tech people more the benefits than the technology itself before we start implementing a hitech application. my 2 cents.

Honestly, VoIP is only one subset of Unified Communications. The shift in the two comes from basicaly static environments to dymanic resource allocation and conversion of formats. To accomplish (in short), requires a re-think of how networks operate. The network itself will require intelligence i.e. rule-of-thumb operation that does more than routing efficiently, but includes the ability to insure format compatibility and inter-operability between connected endpoints.

Follow this link and carefully read and you'll understand the point:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5577042.html

UC is the trendence for communication! fast speed, high capacity!